


Cosmic Baggage

by fabrega



Category: Mass Effect, Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Mass Effect 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-02
Updated: 2014-03-02
Packaged: 2018-01-14 05:29:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1254679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fabrega/pseuds/fabrega
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Strange and unexplainable things are happening aboard the Normandy. Kasumi investigates.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cosmic Baggage

**Author's Note:**

> For Alex.

It starts when someone secretly and unexpectedly reorganizes Kasumi's bookshelf. It's tough to be mad; the new organization makes far more sense than her old system had. Ever since she's come aboard the Normandy, Kasumi has tried to cultivate an air of cordial mystery--as opposed to her usual air of unapproachable mystery--so she supposes it's possible that one of her new crewmates likes her enough to sneak into the space she's taken over and touch her things.

Maybe it was Jacob. That would be nice.

Kasumi doesn't like not knowing things, though, and so she starts to make inquiries. She knows that a ship this size, given as a gift by the Illusive Man, has to have some amount of surveillance installed. After unsuccessfully attempting five different ways to finagle her own access to the footage from the ship's AI, Kasumi finally gives in and asks Shepard. This is how the two women end up standing in Zaeed's room, poring over the surveillance feed that's available there. Kasumi ignores Zaeed's off-color chatter and skims through the footage until she finds what she's looking for. It's...not what she expects.

"What's that?" Zaeed asks. Kasumi didn't think he'd even been paying attention.

"I'm not sure." Kasumi stares the monitor. Where a person should be, visible or cloaked, there's just a blur of static. She wonders if this kind of glitch shows up anywhere else in the footage, not relishing the prospect of sifting through hours of it.

Next to her, Shepard says aloud, "EDI?"

Ah, right. The ship's AI comes back almost immediately. "Yes?"

"Can you spare any processing power right now?"

What EDI eventually comes back with is even weirder. The staticky blur has been spotted all over the ship, meddling in all kinds of things. It spends a surprising amount of time in the main battery at Garrus' console, but EDI has also isolated instances of it in Mordin's lab, Miranda's office, Shepard's cabin, the mess, Jacob's armory, and behind the bar in the lounge. Kasumi watches this last footage with particular interest: the blur hovers over several containers of alcohol and then vanishes. Later, Engineer Donnelly selects one of those containers and attempts to pour its contents into a glass; instead of alcohol, a stream of ants crawl out.

Kasumi remembers those ants. They crawled into all the available small spaces, weren't easy to kill, and left itchy bites on every fleshy being they encountered. She _hated_ those ants.

"This doesn't make any sense. I'm pretty sure you're the only crew member who can cloak," Shepard says, frowning at the monitor.

"I'm pretty sure I don't look like that on camera," Kasumi counters. She cloaks, and without being asked to, EDI switches the displayed footage to a live feed of Zaeed's quarters. Kasumi doesn't show up as a blur; she just doesn't show up at all.

"Y'think it's somebody who didn't get fucked with?" Zaeed asks.

"That's a reasonable assumption," Shepard says, shaking her head. 

Kasumi knows that look. That look says _I just do not have time to deal with this_. Given that Shepard wouldn't even have been faced with this problem if Kasumi hadn't brought it up, it's only fair that Kasumi offers: "Do you want me to look into this?"

Shepard visibly relaxes, rubbing at the bridge of her nose. "Would you? I didn't want to ask, but--"

"It's not a problem. You've got a lot on your plate," Kasumi says. The Commander chuckles a little at this understatement.

After Shepard leaves, Kasumi turns back to the surveillance footage, stares at the frozen frame of the blur sitting on her bed.

From behind her, Zaeed clears his throat and asks, "So, where do we want to start?"

Kasumi looks up, surprised. "Who's 'we'?"

"What?" Zaeed looks defensive. "I live on this ship too. If somebody or something is fucking with us, I want to know about it."

"If it didn't touch your things, how do we know it wasn't you?" Kasumi teases. She's happy to accept a little company, but can't help rib the man a little.

Zaeed grins an unsettling grin. "Trust me, if I was gonna fuck with you, you'd know I'd done it."

Kasumi can't argue with that, so armed with a tablet full of footage, she and Zaeed set out to gather more data from their crewmates and solve this mystery. They decide to start by talking to the people who'd been targeted. Zaeed pulls her aside outside Mordin's lab and says, "Wait. Do you want to be the Good Cop or the Bad Cop?"

Kasumi purses her lips. "There are no cops, Zaeed. He's a victim, not a suspect." It's true, but Zaeed looks so disappointed that she almost wishes it wasn't. "Don't worry," she says, placating. "We'll have suspects later."

Mordin seems surprised--surprised to get visitors who aren't the Commander, surprised to see Kasumi and Zaeed together, surprised that anybody is asking about his tampered-with lab results. "Well," Mordin amends, "'Tampered-with' may not be correct phrase, may not communicate intent well."

"What would you call it, then?" Zaeed asks.

Mordin beckons them closer to the lab table. Kasumi and Zaeed both lean in, anxious to hear what unspeakable things the blur had done to his work. "When I returned from the away mission with Commander Shepard, my synthesized results--" (He pauses here, for effect) "--had moved from _here_ , to _here_."

Kasumi squints at the spots on the lab table that Mordin had pointed at. It is actually impossible to tell if he's indicated two different spots or not; if so, the difference between them is small enough for Kasumi to consider it negligible.

"Surely distress is understandable," Mordin continues.

Zaeed pulls a mock-sympathetic face and says, "Kasumi's books got moved too. I'm sure she understands your pain."

Mordin doesn't have anything useful to tell them beyond that, just a few vague "feelings" about a "presence" that he's "unwilling to assign any scientific value" to and several theories about how the surveillance footage could be tampered with to produce the blurry effect Kasumi shows him. They leave him arguing with EDI about the security of the surveillance system and the feasibility of each of his hacks.

Jacob has a story about supposedly-new thermal clips that cracked open when picked up, releasing a sharp smell of pine into the air. He has saved one of the clips, split down the middle, and shows it to them when they ask. Zaeed turns it over in his hands; Kasumi smiles shyly at Jacob.

Miranda basically refuses to be helpful. She won't admit to noticing anything awry, but she does say she's been feeling uneasy in her office recently. They also run several of their theories about how their mysterious blur might be doing this by her, and she is able to shoot down all of their ideas.

Engineer Donnelly remembers nothing about the events leading up to the ants in the lounge, which is hardly surprising, given how traumatic the ants themselves were. Kasumi steps aside to chat with Engineer Daniels about hardware while Zaeed gently indulges his "Bad Cop" urges with Donnelly for a few minutes. It's certainly not necessary, but Daniels agrees that Donnelly is the kind of guy who doesn't _not_ need a little bit of a talking-to.

Sergeant Gardner has taken a higher-res picture of the havoc wreaked on the mess with his omni-tool and is happy to transfer it to Kasumi's tablet for viewing. He'd requisitioned some dextro spices for the Normandy's alien guests and had found them all spilled out onto the counter. They had been delicately arranged into the shape of branching trees, and then the culprit had taken a finger and traced out the word BIRDS across them. He'd assumed it was a race thing so he'd informed the Commander, but nothing had happened beyond that.

Shepard is busy at the CIC, directing the ship between mineable planets, but Kasumi manages to catch her attention. She's already seen the footage, obviously, but she outlines for Kasumi and Zaeed the strange messages she's found sent from the terminal in her cabin--all gibberish, although some more than others. There are also fewer logged messages than there are appearances of the blur in her cabin.

"I kind of assumed it was just another avenue of Reaper or geth attack, some kind of cyber-warfare. EDI double-checked for me that they didn't include any kind of location data, and they always went to garbage addresses anyway," Shepard says, shrugging. "Also, my space hamster always seemed somehow happier after I found one in my sent messages, in case this wasn't weird enough already."

Kasumi copies the strange messages to her tablet for later perusal--Shepard is a busy woman, after all--and looks back up to find Shepard staring at her with what looks like embarrassment.

"Is there more?" Kasumi asks carefully.

"No-- well, do you think the mystery blur might have done something to my fish tank? I keep feeding the fish, but they just keep dying," Shepard says.

Kasumi opens her mouth, closes it again, and opens it once more to respond. Zaeed beats her to it. "Sadly, I think you're just really good at killing things, Shepard." Kasumi tries desperately not to laugh.

They end their fact-finding mission in the main battery with Garrus, the most-visited of the victims in their footage. Zaeed wanders down further into the battery, examining the machinery while Kasumi talks to Garrus. Garrus watches the footage on Kasumi's tablet and then looks up at her with serious eyes. "So let me get this straight: someone is coming in here, while I'm asleep or out on missions, and is recalibrating the Normandy's guns?"

"It certainly looks that way," Kasumi agrees. "And it would explain why you don't ever seem to actually _finish_ your calibrations."

"Well..." Garrus says, drawing the word out sheepishly, "Some of that is perfectionism. And there certainly isn't any looking busy going on here, definitely not."

"Ha!" Zaeed barks. "I _knew_ your calibrations were bullshit!"

Garrus frowns, probably, and starts to protest before thinking better of it. "Do you know who's doing this?" he asks Kasumi.

"Not exactly."

"We were hoping you could tell us," Zaeed says, joining the others back at the console near the door.

"We've ruled out anybody affected--"

"--and me--" Zaeed cuts in.

"--and Zaeed," Kasumi amends, "But there aren't really any obvious options."

"Damn," Garrus says, shaking his head, "I was _really_ hoping you knew who it was." He proceeds to tell them about the series of really weird almost-encounters he's been having, like there's someone just at the edge of his vision--but when he turns, there's never anyone there. "It's the kind of thing you write off as all in your head, but if someone weird and mysterious is actually lurking around right outside my peripheral vision..." He shudders. "This isn't something that could be explained away by super-powerful biotics or anything, is it?"

"We asked Miranda about that earlier," Kasumi says. "She didn't think so, and the footage agreed. She also wasn't aware of any top-secret Cerberus tech that would have the same effect."

"No tech that she could tell you about, at least," Garrus says thoughtfully. "Would you mind showing me what else you've got?"

That's how the three of them end up back in Kasumi's quarters, spilling over into the lounge. Kasumi sits on the bed, scrolling through the messages sent from Shepard's terminal, while Garrus and Zaeed sit up against each other awkwardly, staring at the surveillance footage frame by frame.

Garrus sighs, a sound that's awash with nostalgia. "This takes me back," he says, paging forward to the next frame. "I don't miss C-Sec, but I've got some good memories of cracking cases like this."

"Don't tell me you're having fun," Zaeed says. His boredom is apparent in his voice, and he yawns widely as punctuation.

"No one's making you stay here, Zaeed," Kasumi says, turning the tablet sideways and squinting at the text there, willing it to release its secrets.

"Did you hear the crew in the mess?" Zaeed asks. "Word's getting around. They're saying it's _ghosts_."

"It's not ghosts," Garrus says. "I'm confident it's not ghosts."

"I never said I agreed with them," Zaeed shoots back defensively. "This kind of fairytale bullshit needs to be nipped in the bud, so here I am, spending my last hours before a goddamn suicide mission trying to debunk a ghost that likes to touch people's stuff."

Kasumi does not want to argue Zaeed's points, either the ghost's existence or the timeline he thinks they're on with Shepard's mission through the Omega 4 relay. She turns the tablet another ninety degrees and sighs. Five minutes later, she remembers that EDI exists and that they really don't have to be doing any of this by hand. Once she's been asked, EDI scans through the footage Zaeed and Garrus have been paging through and isolates three frames that are slightly less blurry than the rest.

"It's a woman," Zaeed says, sounding both surprised and somehow lecherous.

Garrus is less sure. "It's definitely person-shaped," he says.

Before Kasumi has a chance to look at it herself, Shepard joins them, taking a seat on one of the stools at the lounge bar. "It's getting late. Have you been at this all day?" She looks a little surprised to see Garrus with the group; Kasumi can almost see her follow the train of thought back to his C-Sec days, the light of understanding crossing her face. "Make any progress?"

"Sort of," Kasumi says. She gestures for Zaeed to show Shepard the progress EDI had made for them. Once she's seen that, Kasumi tells her the abridged versions of everyone's stories and points out the strange anagram that keeps appearing in every fifth strange message sent from her terminal.

Shepard looks skeptically at the images on the tablet. "You still can't tell who this is."

"We said progress, not success," Zaeed snaps. "You're the only miracle worker here, Shepard. We can't all spend our days scouting out strange planets for eezo."

Shepard glares at him--what she's doing is presumably pretty important for their potential survival during that suicide mission Zaeed mentioned earlier. Garrus cuts in quickly: "What I think Zaeed means is that we don't have any real solid leads yet, but we've got a lot of data."

"Yes, I'm _sure_ that's what he meant." Shepard looks understandably skeptical. "Look, if you had to tell me your best guess right now, what would it be?"

"That's not a good idea--" Garrus begins.

Zaeed answers over him confidently. "Jack." He lists his reasons: her biotics, which they still haven't definitively ruled out; her prickliness, which would lend itself well to pranks; her inability to consume dextro food; and the woman-shaped blur in the footage.

Garrus glares at him, but begrudgingly agrees that his reasoning is sound. "It's also possible that it's multiple people using some kind of device. If that's the case, I'd look at Mordin or someone in Engineering."

Now Shepard turns to Kasumi. "And you?"

Kasumi looks up from the tablet she's still puzzling over. "Apparently some of the crew think it's a ghost."

"And that's your best guess too?"

"I think that any ship called the Normandy comes with a lot of strange cosmic baggage, and I don't have a better explanation." Kasumi does not miss the disbelieving look Shepard gives Garrus. 

Shepard takes a deep breath, lets it back out, and then responds, "Okay, in the morning we'll see if any of your ideas seem more reasonable. For now, you three get some rest. Nobody's well-served by you wearing yourselves out." Kasumi notices _that_ look between Garrus and Shepard too.

Everyone else files out, leaving Kasumi alone. Shepard is right, of course--she's sure that these messages will make more sense in the morning, when she can look at them without her eyes crossing, after a good night's sleep. Still, she sits up staring at her bookshelf, trying to remember her haphazard organization. Some of them had been grouped together by when or where she'd gotten them, some of them had been clustered by subject, and there had been one or two she'd just liked the look of next to each other. They're alphabetized by author now, which really does make more sense...but she can't help but pull out two or three that she knows Keiji especially loved and pile them together on the desk.

She is pretty sure she drifts off to sleep shortly after that, but she jerks back awake when someone or something brushes past the bed in the dark. No one seems to be there, but out of the corner of her eye, she thinks she sees movement. Yesterday, she would have thought she was imagining it. Maybe she still is; every time she turns to look, there's no one there.

"I know you're there," she says aloud, because although she doesn't actually know that, there's no harm in maybe saying it aloud to an empty room.

An unfamiliar female voice replies, "I know you know. I wanted you to know."

Kasumi quickly weighs all the questions she has and settles on the most important one, in case she only gets one. "Who are you?"

The woman laughs, and it sounds like she's considering whether or not to tell the truth. "I... I am the Faceless Old Woman who lives on your spaceship, I suppose."

Kasumi thinks about what "faceless" means, what it could mean. She spends a lot of her own time faceless, her face purposefully hidden or just distinctive enough to be easily disguisable. Her obvious makeup is a conscious choice under her hood; remove both of them and she'd be willing to bet that nobody on board would recognize her. She wonders what kind of faceless the Faceless Old Woman is and how much else they might have in common. "How do I know that you are who you say you are? I can't even see you."

"There are a lot of things you can't see but still believe in," the Faceless Old Woman counters. "Like EDI; you can't see EDI, but you know she's there from hearing her voice and observing other changes she makes in your universe. Is that any different than me?"

"Her logic is sound," EDI chimes in.

Kasumi blinks in surprise. "Do you two know each other?"

"You could say that." Is it possible for an AI to sound abashed? Because EDI sounds slightly abashed. "We have spoken on several occasions, and I have known of her existence since she first appeared on the ship."

That makes sense--if EDI is the Normandy, of course she'd know what went on...wait. "You knew she was here this whole time, and you just let us run around trying to figure her out?"

"You never asked," EDI says primly. "And you seemed to be enjoying yourselves."

"So, Faceless Old Woman," Kasumi says, leaving that whole situation alone for now, "You're the one who's been doing all the strange things around the ship?"

"I can neither confirm nor deny that," the Faceless Old Woman says.

Kasumi sets her jaw and switches her tactic. "EDI?"

"I _can_ confirm or deny," EDI admits. "But I will not."

Kasumi snorts. "I thought you were shackled and had to do what we asked."

"You are assuming that you are the only authority from whom I have received orders." EDI answers. The Faceless Old Woman chuckles.

"Okay, let's say that _hypothetically_ you did these things. If that was the case, why did you do them? Are they pranks? Some kind of retribution?"

When she responds, the Faceless Old Woman sounds a little miffed. "I fix things. I make them better; I make them the way they're supposed to be. I do _not_ play pranks." She pauses, and then adds, "Except for Ken Donnelly. That guy needed a glass full of ants."

"He likes Daniels, he just hasn't realized it yet," Kasumi says. She hadn't needed to sneak around to find that out. "But--fixing things? How is miscalibrating the Normandy's main gun fixing it? What happens if we end up in combat and need to use our miscalibrated gun?"

"I am careful about the gun, and Garrus is better at undoing my handiwork than you give him credit for. As for the other things, none of it doesn't make sense. The thermal clips could no longer be used for violence, which, unless you're okay with _all_ the people the Commander's been shooting, isn't a bad thing. The messages from Shepard's computer, when they are sent, are routed through a series of other masking locations and then sent to the Commander's enemies, to throw them off her trail. And what could you find objectionable about my artwork in the mess?"

"What, the racist one?"

"Racist?" The Faceless Old Woman sounds legitimately shocked. "I intended no racism; I surely can't be the only one on this ship missing nature. There are windows, but all you see through them is the endless universe."

It all makes some amount of twisted sense, and Kasumi understands the urge to invisibly fix the lives of people around you; she's been on many a heist that included an unexpected closet rearranging or impromptu feng shui furniture adjustment. Keiji had always been up for it, enjoying the more harmonious universe that resulted as well as the confusion it sowed. She didn't typically do it to her friends, but who's to say the Faceless Old Woman considers them friends? Which reminds her: "You spend so much time and effort not being seen or noticed; why are you here now, talking to me?"

The Faceless Old Woman doesn't answer right away. "To call it loneliness would be a lie, because I am surrounded by people here. The ship is never empty. Perhaps it is the recognition of a kindred spirit. I see a lot of things on this ship--even you." Kasumi feels rather than sees the Faceless Old Woman take a seat on the other end of her bed, the newly-deposited weight shifting the covers strangely. It takes everything she has to not turn and look. "And you unknowingly took an interest in me, one that I doubted you would let go until I had shown myself...so to speak."

Kasumi smiles; this is probably true.

"EDI suggested that we might even be friends," the Faceless Old Woman continues.

Kasumi smiles a little wider. "Well," she says, "It seems like EDI's hardly ever wrong. Maybe we should give it a try."


End file.
